Trust – The Most Important Component of a Sound Working Relationship – Is Absent In The Large Translation Agency Model

 

The corporate business model has in the last few decades transformed the landscape of life in this and many other countries. You can drive from California all the way to the Atlantic ocean and you will see the same names of the same stores gracing the same suburban shopping malls that look exactly the same from outside and inside, located near the same sprawl of cookie cutter bedroom communities where, as somebody put it once, love goes to die.

On the one hand, it is a reassuring and comforting feeling that no matter where we are, we know what will be on the menu at the Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesday, or Pizza Hut.

And since we know what the restaurant will look like inside, we don’t even have to ask where the restrooms are. That is an important part of the reassuring and comforting design. We are not expected to ask questions. If by any chance somebody still has questions, answers have been already provided and they can be accessed in a computer database, printed out and distributed to friendly and helpful, albeit grossly underpaid, personnel.

Everything has been standardized, unified, precut and preassembled for us ahead of time. When we go to vote – and the numbers of those of us who still bother to vote, which is typically less than half of registered voters in this country, are rapidly dwindling – we can either vote for a D or for an R, both enthusiastically preapproved and fully funded by the same giant and enormously profitable corporations and giant and enormously profitable banks.

Unlike the rest of us, the biggest of these enormously profitable corporate enterprises generally pay no taxes in this country.

Oh, what a thrill it is to watch the results on TV on those excitement-filled election nights when we finally find out whether it was the Rs or the Ds who won this time around!

****************

The corporate model has been also applied and perfected in the past two decades to what is often called for lack of a better term the translation industry. Large translation agencies also typically use the same corporate business model. The differences between the pre-corporate model of translation agencies and the modern corporate model are clearly visible, but perhaps only to those of us who have been cranking out translations for all kinds of customers for a few decades. In my case, it would be close to three decades.

Take the example of so-called Non-Disclosure Agreements (“NDAs”). Only some fifteen years ago, NDAs typically had around 150 words, and their purpose was to protect confidentiality of customer’s documents.

The NDA that I was sent this week from a translation agency with offices in United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, which wanted to recruit me for a long-term project, had 6,977 words. There was a lot of “whereas” in it, and a lot of definitions of the rules that I as a translator, undoubtedly just one of thousands translators who would be entered into a huge database of translators and would-be translators had I signed the agreement, would need to follow to the letter.

A decade or two ago, there was a certain amount of trust between two professional parties called translators and translation agencies – that is why the agreements were so short. In the corporate translation agency model, the trust has completely disappeared – that is why the new agreements are so long.

Although about a half a page was dedicated in this agreement, which had 6,977 words, to the manner in which invoices had to be presented by the translator, the payment terms were not specified.

So, although I was not going to sign it anyway, I asked the person who was communicating with me on behalf of a translation agency with offices in three countries whether they would pay in 30 days. Call me unreasonable, but since I have to pay my bills and credit cards within 30 days, I expect my creditors to pay me in 30 days as well.

“60 days.” was the terse answer. The worker bees called translators who work for the corporate type of translation agency simply have to figure out what to eat during the additional 30 days when they are forced to wait for their money, while their bills remain unpaid and keep stacking up.

I hear that tree bark, while somewhat bitter, is still free at this point, can provide sustenance, and is quite filling.

Fortunately, people are starting to realize that corporate model is not all that it is cranked up to be.

Small family restaurants keep popping up even in suburbs and in otherwise bland and uniform shopping malls. Small restaurants do have some advantages over corporate chains. They offer a completely different menu, which often depends on the personality and the country of origin of the restaurant owner. The profits generated by restaurants are not siphoned off by anonymous shareholders thousands of miles away, while the people doing the actual work are paid minimum wage. The profits stay with the actual owners of small, family restaurants because these are the same people who work in these restaurants, and thus will be reinvested in local economy.

It is simply no longer possible to find a large translation agency that would pay good rates to translators, and pay them on time. Just about every week I ignore several e-mails or calls from large agencies with a promise of work for this mad patent translator. Yesterday it was an e-mail from another agency somewhere in Europe that is bidding on a large project involving translation from “all Euro languages”, including some of those that I translate. They wanted me to fill out an online questionnaire and send them a copy of my university diploma and references.

Why in the world would I want to waste my time with something like that? I don’t even know whether they will land the project, how much they pay, and how soon. (Wait, I realized that I do know the answer to the last two points. It seems to be a fairly large agency, so they pay peanuts, in sixty days.)

The most important component of the relationship between a translation agency and a translator is trust. In the old, pre-corporate model, the agency trusted the translator because the people running the enterprise, often former translators themselves, knew him or her personally, and thus knew exactly what the translator was really good at.

And the same was true also about the translators.

In the new, corporate model, the often clueless project managers know only that the translators can no longer be trusted. That is why one of the clauses in theses 7,000-word-long agreements is often that should the translation agency in its wisdom decide to sue the translator, the translator will have to pay the legal costs.

It is my considered opinion that the best way to deal with the large translation agencies  is to completely ignore them and concentrate on direct customers and very small agencies.That is what I have been doing and will continue to do for as long as I keep translating.

****************

Incidentally, I did find a new translation agency customer this year: a tiny, one-person translation agency with a name that sounded exactly like the name of a tiny agency that I used to work for quite a bit in the nineties, until it seemingly disappeared into thin air at the beginning of this century.

It turned out that the owner of the agency retired and sold it a few years ago. So instead of working for a one-man agency, I am now occasionally working for a one-woman agency, an agency that has the same name, uses the same business principles and works with the same translators who are still listed in its ancient files.

In other words, the kind of translation agency that both translators and customers can still trust these days.